Rhetoric, Reasoning & Argumentation

52 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Rhetoric, Reasoning & Argumentation.

• Ad Baculum (Appeal to Force) — The fallacy of securing acceptance of a claim by threatening the listener rather than giving reasons bearing on its truth — a relevance error in which a payoff-altering signal is substituted for a truth-bearing one, so compliant assent and warranted belief come apart.
• Ad Hominem — Reject or discredit a claim by substituting an attack on its source — character, motives, circumstances, inconsistency, or affiliation — for evaluation of the claim and its evidence.
• Ad Misericordiam (Appeal to Pity) — Win acceptance of a claim by evoking sympathy or pity rather than supplying evidence, substituting an affective shift in the audience for epistemic support on a proposition that is independent of the speaker's circumstances.
• Ad Nauseam (Argument from Repetition) — Diagnose the fallacy of treating a claim as established by bare repetition, where frequency raises felt credibility through processing fluency while adding zero new evidential warrant.
• Ad Populum (Appeal to the People) — Name the fallacy of treating a claim as established by its popularity, and expose the defect with one test — did the believers independently weigh the same evidence, or inherit the belief through a social channel? — that separates warranted aggregation from an influence cascade wearing the same clothes.
• Ad Verecundiam (Appeal to Authority) — The informal fallacy of treating a claim as established by an authority's credential under conditions where the citation carries no evidential weight — the credential being a signal that load-bearing conditions (domain competence, evidence access, disinterest, convergence) hold, used as though it guaranteed what it only heuristically suggests.
• Antithesis — Sharpen a contrast by fusing two primitives — parallel grammatical form and opposed content — so a matched syntactic frame delivers the opposition at a controlled, audible beat.
• Apologia — Analyze or build a defense of impugned conduct as a combination of four strategy primitives — denial, bolstering, differentiation, transcendence — where denial and transcendence are mutually exclusive, so mixing them produces an incoherent, self-damaging apologia.
• Bulverism — Assume an opponent's conclusion is false, then explain the psychological or sociological cause of their 'error' — substituting a genetic account of the belief for the logical evaluation that was owed.
• Cherry Picking — Selectively presenting confirming evidence while suppressing disconfirming evidence from the same available population, so the offered sample gives an impression the full distribution would not support — locating the dishonesty in the selection process, not the individual data points.
• Chiasmus — State two elements in one order and then restate them with their roles swapped (A-B, then B-A) across a pivot, so the crossed inversion silently asserts that the relation runs both ways.
• Chronological Snobbery — The fallacy of dismissing a belief solely because it is old — substituting a temporal fact for a content-specific reason — corrected by Lewis's question of whether the view was actually refuted or merely fell out of fashion, with an age-as-credit mirror in appeal to tradition.
• Circular Reasoning — Diagnose an argument whose conclusion already appears among its premises by tracing its justification graph for a cycle that never touches a node the audience grants independently.
• Complex Question — Expose a question that smuggles a contested claim in as its presupposition, so every direct answer silently ratifies the claim and the only sound reply is to refuse the frame.
• Concession — Grant a peripheral or indefensible part of the opposing case while continuing to contest the rest, purchasing credibility through costly-looking admission and, if the granted claim was not load-bearing, harvesting narrowing, burden-shift, and board-clearing at once.
• Etymological fallacy — Treat a word's historical origin as binding on its present meaning, mistaking a fact about language history for a fact about how today's speakers actually use the word.
• Fallacy of Accident — The inferential mistake of applying a general rule mechanically to a case that satisfies its terms but lies outside its intended scope — treating a defeasible generalisation, carrying an implicit ceteris paribus clause, as an exceptionless universal.
• Fallacy of Composition — Infer that a predicate established for one or all parts must hold of the whole they form, without a warranted preservation rule across aggregation, interaction, scale, configuration, or shared constraints.
• Fallacy of Division — Catch the inferential error of attributing a property true of a whole to each of its parts, by testing whether the predicate is one a part can hold in isolation or one that exists only in the aggregation, configuration, or interaction of parts.
• False Equivalence — The fallacy of treating two things as comparably weighted on the dimension a judgment turns on, when they in fact differ by an order of magnitude or by kind — by highlighting a genuine shared feature and suppressing the difference that actually controls.
• False Precision — The measurement-communication fallacy of expressing a quantity with more significant figures or tighter bounds than the underlying evidence supports — a mismatch between the form of the claim and its warrant, read by audiences as unearned precision of knowledge.
• Forensic Rhetoric — The Aristotelian speech genre whose subject is past action under judgment — what happened, who is responsible, what remedy follows — fixed by a five-element apparatus (backward time orientation, judging audience, rules of evidence, explanation and exculpation topoi, verdict-form output) that recurs across every institutionalized judgment forum.
• Genetic Fallacy — Judge a claim, practice, object, or idea by source or origin information as though it settled present truth, validity, or merit, replacing the evaluation that is owed with an origin story not independently connected to the relevant criterion.
• Guilt by Association — Discredit a claim by the disreputable company it keeps — treating shared supporters, origins, or venues as a verdict on content — a relevance failure that lets no truth-value flow along co-occurrence edges without an independent causal or evidential link.
• Invention (Rhetorical Canon) — Systematically canvass the arguments available in a case by visiting a fixed catalogue of topoi in turn, treating coverage of that space — not the quality of any one argument — as the standard of adequacy, before any choice of what to advance begins.
• Irrelevant conclusion — Prove a sound argument for a proposition that is not the one at issue, then treat it as settling the contested claim — a relevance failure caught by restating the question before grading the answer.
• Kairotic Window — Treat effectiveness as the coincidence of a fixed message with a bounded interval of audience receptivity (kairos, not clock-time), so an act delivered outside the window is premature or stale and cannot be rescued by improving its content.
• Kettle logic — A defensive pattern in which an arguer offers several mutually contradictory defenses at once — each sufficient alone but jointly self-undermining — so the scatter is itself evidence that none is relied upon and the aim is deflection by volume, not vindication.
• Litotes — Assert something by negating its contrary — 'not bad' for good, 'no small feat' for a substantial achievement — so the gap between the stated-weak negation and the conveyed-strong meaning does the work, typically intensifying under a culturally trained convention the audience must share.
• Logos — Persuade through the apparent rational structure of an argument — premises, evidence, and inferential steps — so an audience reads the force as grounded in reasoning rather than in the speaker's character or its own emotion.
• Memory (Rhetorical Canon) — The fourth classical rhetorical canon: the orator's living, indexed archive of arguments, examples, and passages — acquired before performance, organized for retrieval, and reachable under the pressure of a live occasion, not rote recall of a fixed script.
• Middle Ground Fallacy — Detect the error of concluding the truth must lie between two opposed positions merely because they are opposed — substituting a positional operation for an evidential one — by asking whether the midpoint keeps its credibility once one position is shown unsupported.
• Moralistic fallacy — Detect the inference that runs from normative undesirability straight to empirical falsity — 'this would be bad if true, therefore it is not so' — foreclosing a factual question on a moral ground without any evidence being weighed, the mirror of the naturalistic fallacy.
• Motte-and-bailey fallacy — Maintain a strong controversial claim and a weak defensible one under the same label, advancing the strong claim when unchallenged but retreating to the weak one under fire and resuming the strong claim once the challenge passes — so the motte's successful defence is misread as vindicating the bailey.
• Moving the goalposts — An argumentative pattern in which, on being shown evidence that meets a previously stipulated standard, one party revises the standard upward to block the conclusion rather than accept it — repeated so that no finite evidence can settle the question.
• Narrative Paradigm — Walter Fisher's theory that humans judge value-laden arguments by narrative rationality — narrative coherence (does the story hang together?) and fidelity (does it ring true against experience?) — rather than by formal-logical soundness.
• Naturalistic Fallacy — The metaethical error of identifying goodness with a natural property, exposed by the open-question argument — for any proposed good = N, 'but is N good?' stays a meaningful question, so goodness cannot be identical with any natural property it merely co-occurs with.
• Package-Deal Fallacy — Treat a set of positions bundled together only by coalition, tradition, or product line as if they were logically inseparable, so that endorsing one forces endorsing all and rejecting one requires rejecting the whole.
• Poisoning the Well — Pre-emptively discrediting the source of a forthcoming argument, so an anchoring frame of suspicion is installed first and every later thing the source says is received through it — including any rebuttal, read as defensiveness.
• Red Herring — Deflect a discussion by introducing material irrelevant to the open question, so attention and the conversational floor shift to the new topic and the original question is left feeling-addressed-but-unanswered — the test being whether the new material does any work on the claim that was open.
• Relative Privation — The informal fallacy of dismissing a concern by pointing to a worse problem elsewhere, conflating severity-ranking with action-licensing — since ranking governs how much total attention a problem warrants, not whether it is eligible for any, unless the worse problem's resources are genuinely exclusive.
• Rhetorical Listening — Suspend rebuttal and parse another's discourse through three moves — what they claim as their stakes, what genuinely remains contested, and what your own position lets you hear — so an accurate hearing and a firm 'no' become compatible.
• Rhetorical Question — Use interrogative form to perform an assertion rather than seek information, leaving the answer for the audience to supply internally so their self-generated agreement does the persuading — a move whose success rides entirely on an accurate audience model.
• Rhetorical Situation — Read any occasion that calls a discourse forth through three slots — exigence, audience, and constraints — treating communication as a fit problem so that a misfit traces to a specific misread element rather than to a defect of craft.
• Slippery Slope — Flag a consequence-chain argument as fallacious when its inter-step links are held together only by conceivability rather than a demonstrated mechanism, so it blocks a proposal by gesturing at a speculative terminus.
• Special Pleading — The fallacy of exempting a favored case from a general standard the arguer just invoked, without a principled basis — a consistency violation under self-serving direction, exposed by asking whether the arguer would grant the same exception to an opponent.
• Spotlight Fallacy — Infer that a property is common in a population because it is prominent in coverage of it — mistaking a selection bias for a base rate, since an attention-allocating channel surfaces cases by newsworthiness rather than by frequency.
• Straw Man — Refute a weakened proxy of an opponent's view instead of the view they actually hold, so an apparent victory leaves the real position untouched.
• Topoi — The pre-formed argument templates of rhetorical invention — a finite catalogue of move-forms (definition, a fortiori, cause-and-effect, sign, precedent) whose form is fixed and content variable — so finding arguments becomes an auditable search through a known library rather than creation ex nihilo.
• Toulmin Model — Decompose an informal argument into six named slots — claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal — so evaluation becomes a completeness check that isolates the usually-implicit warrant, where almost every contested dispute actually lives.
• Tu Quoque — Catch the fallacy of rebutting a charge by alleging the accuser commits the same offence — substituting a verdict on the speaker's standing for a verdict on the speaker's claim — by asking whether the dispute was about a proposition's truth or the speaker's standing.
• Wrong Direction (Reverse Causation Fallacy) — Catch the error of assigning a causal arrow A→B when it actually runs B→A on the strength of a symmetric association alone, by refusing any oriented claim until temporal precedence or interventional response fixes the direction.